[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 39 (Tuesday, March 5, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1652-S1654]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CLOTURE MOTION
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before
the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will state.
The bill clerk read as follows:
Cloture Motion
We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the
provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate,
do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the nomination
of Chad A. Readler, of Ohio, to be United States Circuit
Judge for the Sixth Circuit.
Mitch McConnell, David Perdue, Roy Blunt, John Cornyn,
Joni Ernst, Lindsey Graham, John Boozman, Mike Rounds,
Thom Tillis, Steve Daines, James E. Risch, John Hoeven,
Mike Crapo, Shelley Moore Capito, John Thune, Pat
Roberts, Jerry Moran.
[[Page S1653]]
The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum
call has been waived.
The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the
nomination of Chad A. Readler, of Ohio, to be United States Circuit
Judge for the Sixth Circuit, shall be brought to a close?
The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant bill clerk called the roll.
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders)
and the Senator from Arizona (Ms. Sinema) are necessarily absent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 53, nays 45, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 36 Ex.]
YEAS--53
Alexander
Barrasso
Blackburn
Blunt
Boozman
Braun
Burr
Capito
Cassidy
Collins
Cornyn
Cotton
Cramer
Crapo
Cruz
Daines
Enzi
Ernst
Fischer
Gardner
Graham
Grassley
Hawley
Hoeven
Hyde-Smith
Inhofe
Isakson
Johnson
Kennedy
Lankford
Lee
McConnell
McSally
Moran
Murkowski
Paul
Perdue
Portman
Risch
Roberts
Romney
Rounds
Rubio
Sasse
Scott (FL)
Scott (SC)
Shelby
Sullivan
Thune
Tillis
Toomey
Wicker
Young
NAYS--45
Baldwin
Bennet
Blumenthal
Booker
Brown
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Coons
Cortez Masto
Duckworth
Durbin
Feinstein
Gillibrand
Harris
Hassan
Heinrich
Hirono
Jones
Kaine
King
Klobuchar
Leahy
Manchin
Markey
Menendez
Merkley
Murphy
Murray
Peters
Reed
Rosen
Schatz
Schumer
Shaheen
Smith
Stabenow
Tester
Udall
Van Hollen
Warner
Warren
Whitehouse
Wyden
NOT VOTING--2
Sanders
Sinema
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the nomination.
The bill clerk read the nomination of Chad A. Readler, of Ohio, to be
United States Circuit Judge for the Sixth Circuit.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Climate Change
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, in California, several counties and
cities are suing the big oil companies to hold them liable for the
damages that climate change is causing to the infrastructure out there.
As judges consider these cases, one thing they will be asked to keep in
mind is Big Oil's history of deception and lies.
A group of scientific experts filed this friend-of-the-court brief
out in the Ninth Circuit, carefully charting that history, that pattern
of deception and lies. The group of scholars and scientists chronicled
how the fossil fuel companies had actual knowledge of the risks of
their products and had taken ``proactive steps to conceal their
knowledge and discredit climate science'' while at the same time taking
steps based on that science to protect their own assets from the
impacts of climate change.
It is a 51-page document, so let me cut to the chase. Big Oil knew
for a very long time that the production and burning of fossil fuels
would be disastrous for the planet. Yet they did everything in their
power to confuse the public, undermine the scientific evidence of the
dangers, and prevent action to stave off this worldwide problem. The
brief makes a fascinating read. Here are some highlights.
Way back in 1959, when I was a kid and Dwight Eisenhower was
President, Columbia University held a symposium attended by oil
industry executives to mark the 100th anniversary of the petroleum
industry. At that event, the legendary Dr. Edward Teller, a physicist,
warned the industry about global warming. He said:
[A] temperature rise corresponding to a 10 percent increase
in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and
submerge New York. . . . [T]his chemical contamination is
more serious than most people tend to believe.
In 1959. A few years later, in 1965, at the American Petroleum
Institute's annual meeting, API president Frank Ikard briefed the Big
Oil trade group on a report from President Johnson's Science Advisory
Committee that predicted significant global warming by the end of the
century, caused by fossil fuels, and warned that ``there is still time
to save the world's peoples from the catastrophic consequence of
pollution, but time is running out.'' The American Petroleum Institute,
1965.
API then commissioned a Stanford Research Institute report on the
climate problem which was made available to its membership in 1968. The
report said:
[R]ising levels of CO2 would likely result in
rising global temperatures. . . . [T]he result could be
melting ice caps, rising sea levels, warming oceans, and
serious environmental damage on a global scale.
Then, in 1969, Stanford produced a supplemental report for the
American Petroleum Institute. As the authors of this brief tell the
Ninth Circuit, ``The report projected that . . . atmospheric
CO2 concentrations would reach 370 [parts per million] by
2000--exactly what it turned out to be.'' That was 1968 and 1969, very
clear warnings that have come to pass.
Big Oil did not just rely on the American Petroleum Institute to do
its research on climate change. Ed Garvey was an Exxon scientist at the
time. Mr. Garvey said:
By the late 1970s, global warming was no longer
speculative.
Did you get that? ``By the late 1970s, global warming was no longer
speculative,'' said the Exxon scientist.
The issue was not were we going to have a problem, the issue was
simply how soon and how fast and how bad was it going to be. Not if.
Indeed, Exxon did a lot of climate research, and they understood the
science well. A 1979 internal Exxon study found that:
[The] increase [in CO2 concentration] is due to
fossil fuel combustion . . . and the present trend of fossil
fuel consumption will cause dramatic environmental effects
before the year 2050.
Meanwhile--back to the American Petroleum Institute--they had put
together a task force on what they called the CO2 problem.
In 1980, Dr. John Laurman told this API task force that ``foreseeable
temperature increases could have major economic consequences [and]
globally catastrophic effects.'' The American Petroleum Institute,
1980.
Back at Exxon, Roger Cohen, the director of Exxon's Theoretical and
Mathematical Sciences Laboratory, warned in 1981--the next year--about
the magnitude of this problem.
[I]t is distinctly possible that [Exxon's planning]
scenario will later produce effects which will indeed be
catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the
earth's population).
In 1982, Roger Cohen reiterated his warning:
Over the past several years a clear scientific consensus
has emerged regarding--
This is 1982--
the expected climatic effects of increased atmospheric
CO2.
He continues:
[There is] unanimous agreement in the scientific community
that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring
about significant changes in the earth's climate.
Unanimous agreement in the scientific community.
In 1982, Exxon's own scientist said this, but almost four decades
later, the Trump administration pretends that we just don't know. Well,
we do know.
Back to the brief. In 1982, an internal Exxon corporate primer said
that, in order to mitigate the effects of global warming, ``[there is a
need for] major reductions in fossil fuel combustion. . . . [T]here are
some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered. . . .
[O]nce the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.''
So on into the late seventies and the early eighties, they knew.
This is from a 1998 report by Shell Oil's Greenhouse Effect Working
Group:
Man-made carbon dioxide, released into and accumulated in
the atmosphere, is believed to warm the earth through the so-
called greenhouse effect. . . . [B]y the time the global
warming becomes detectible it could be too late to take
effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to
stabilise the situation.
So, long story short, Big Oil knew, API knew, Exxon knew, Shell knew.
They knew, but Big Oil also realized that understanding climate change
meant limiting carbon emissions, and that meant less oil sales. So they
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began to tell something very different than what they knew to the
public.
A 1998 Exxon internal memo acknowledged that the ``greenhouse effect
may be one of the most significant environmental issues for the
1990s,'' but Exxon's position would be to try to ``[e]mphasize the
uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced
Greenhouse effect,'' and that became the drumbeat of the industry:
minimize the danger--the one they knew--that the greenhouse effect may
be one of the most significant environmental issues for the 1990s but,
instead, undermine the science.
So the industry set up front groups with innocuous-sounding names
like the Global Climate Coalition or the Information Council on the
Environment to do this PR work for it. The scientific brief notes this
bit of industry propaganda from 1996 from the so-called Global Climate
Coalition: ``If there is an anthropogenic component to this observed
warming, the GCC believes that it must be very small.''
Well, here is what an earlier draft of the same document said:
``[The] scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential
impacts of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2
on climate is well established and cannot be denied.''
They just weren't telling the truth. They knew, and they said things
they knew were not true.
Money poured from the oil industry into these denialist groups. In
1991, the so-called Information Council on the Environment launched a
nationwide campaign with one goal, to ``reposition global warming as
theory (not fact).'' This thing they said was well established and
cannot be denied, they decided to reposition as theory, not fact.
The polluters kept this up all the way through the 1990s. A 1998
American Petroleum Institute strategy memo tells what they wanted
people to believe, even though they knew it wasn't true. They said:
``[It is] not known for sure whether (a) climate change is actually
occurring, or (b) if it is, whether humans really have any influence on
it.''
Again, well established, cannot be denied on the one hand and not
sure whether it is occurring or whether humans have anything to do with
it on the other hand.
Here is Martin Hoffert, who was an Exxon scientist for 20 years. He
said:
Even though we--
``We,'' meaning the Exxon scientists.
Even though we were writing all these papers . . . [saying]
that climate change from CO2 emissions was going
to change the climate of the earth . . . the front office--
The front office said otherwise.
. . . the front office which was concerned with promoting the
products of the company was also supporting people that we
call climate change deniers.
So even as they spun this massive fraud out to the public, Big Oil
internally took the evidence of climate change seriously. They took the
evidence of climate change seriously enough to factor it into their own
planet. So while they were telling the public ``This isn't for real,
and we don't have anything to do it with, and the science isn't
secure,'' they were doing their own planning based on that very
science.
For instance, in designing and building the Sable gas field project
off the shores of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Mobil, Shell, and Imperial Oil
explicitly told their own engineers about sea level rise. They said
that ``[a]n estimated rise . . . due to global warming, of 0.5 meters
may be assumed.''
Big Oil protected its own assets against predicted sea level rise
based on this science, while, at the same time, funding a massive
campaign of deception to fool the public and policymakers about this
science. They protected themselves, and they connived to prevent the
public from taking steps to protect itself.
There are some unsung heroes in this climate battle. Among them
number the dedicated and assiduous group of scholars and scientists who
track this climate denial apparatus that this industry built. Many of
them are the authors of this brief, such as Robert Brule, Justin
Farrell, Benjamin Franta, Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes, and
Geoffrey Supran. They are just a few. There are many, many others who
are watching, examining, reporting, and subject to a peer review
chronicling the climate denial apparatus set up by the oil industry to
fool the public. They patiently and thoroughly assembled in their brief
a record of industry malfeasance, and they are helping to make sure
that the long history of industry deception is part of the court's
official record.
I thank them for their work.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. McSally). The majority leader.
Order of Business
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that all
postcloture time on the Readler nomination expire at 4 p.m. on
Wednesday, March 6; further, that if confirmed, the motion to
reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President
be immediately notified of the Senate's action.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________